Recently in Apple Category

Like many people, I've been rumour watching the iPhone 3G announcement, likely tomorrow. I decided not to get an iPhone last year and bought a Nokia N95 instead. I've quite enjoyed having the Nokia phone, the WiFi and the camera have been really useful.

However several things appeal about the new iPhone. The sheer usability of the phone is amazing, having played with friends' iPhones, going back to the cursor puck and soft keys of the N95 feels limiting. The bundled, essentially limitless internet access with O2 is a real draw, much like having wifi at home makes the internet part of my life, having mobile access to information is very tempting, especially with a fixed cost.

The app store is an interesting development, I've downloaded a few apps to my N95, but not in great numbers and I've never bought an application. The iTunes derived store on the other hand has me excited. The webapps are ok, a taster of what is to come I think. Even the games look good.

I think it is part of the clean integration that Apple are offering with the iPhone. It will be easy to find and purchase apps. I'll use the same tools I use to manage my music. Contact and address book management on the N95 never felt like they were that well integrated with my life. The simple change that I can plug my iPhone into my mac to charge it, in fact the default mode means that will sync my phone regularly. With the N95, as the Nokia software is primarily Windows based this never became a reality, it was possible, just not straightforward. This simple MacOSX based integration is a compelling attraction and one of the main reasons I'm planning on breaking my contract with Orange.

However, I'd still really want a few things from the new iPhone. A better still camera and one that can shoot video. I have shot a lot of fun little clips of video with the N95, so losing that would be sad. 32G would be great, then I can more or less leave my 5G iPod at home for the car. Video is probably the main one, pulling out a phone to grab 30 seconds of my son being cute is pretty important.

So after 11 years, I think, with Orange I'm off to O2, actually mainly I'm off to Apple in effect. Too much of the Orange and Nokia support is focused around Windows, given past market share that is reasonable, but time consuming for me. Like my choice of computer is now down to whatever models of MacBook Apple release I'm happy to say the same about my choice of phone for the foreseeable future. There are better things to waste time over than choosing a phone.

I've been using Transmit to backup my files to strongspace for a year or more, resting easy in the knowledge that I have an offsite snapshot of my Documents folder. I've also been backing up my Address Book files from ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and my iCal files too. However with the arrival of Leopard, the way the address book stores data has changed, using the new Core Data storage mechanisms. There is a new AddressBook-v22.abcddb database file and a new metadata folder. This data was taking a long time to backup via transmit. The mirroring in Transmit seems to change directories between images and metadata a lot. So I wanted a more simple and quicker approach.

I'm already using Automator via iCal to run the backups. See this recipe from Joyent. So I opened Automator and deleted the folder based backup I had been using and set about figuring out how to backup the data in my address book. I tried a bunch of different approaches, but the one which works is to export all the entries to vcards and then backup the resulting files.
To do this you'll need to do two things, create a new group in Address Book containing everyone and then create the Automator script below.

My oldest data in my Address Book is about 5 years old, as I've been upgrading macosx since 10.1. I think these settings will work for everyone, the important thing is that both rules have the same timeframe. This gets you a new group with every entry that you can access from Automator. The default All group is not usable from Automator.

Then you need to enter the three rules above in Automator. Find every person in the group you just created. Then you need to get the details of the people. Applescript, the technology behind Automator is a bit odd, what the first rule does is get a collection of objects representing the people, the second rule turns these into real people. If you run these three rules in isolation in Automator you can see this process happen, look at the results tab.

Then the last rule exports these people into vcard files in your file system, it will overwrite existing files. This is what we want to have happen in this case, but it is best to give it an empty folder of its own.

I then run my normal mirror upload to Strongspace of my Documents folder. I was getting mirror times of over an hour previously using the mirroring the address book folder. With this vcard based approach it takes seconds.

Tags:
apple, leopard, macosx, Address Book, StrongSpace, backup, automator, transmit

Some quick thoughts on the new Leopard release, others such as John Siracusa and John Gruber have done such a comprehensive jobs, that these are merely personal observations after 12 hours of use.

The checking DVD consistency from the intstaller seems a bit odd, but I guess there must have been too many problems with scratched DVDs in the past for this to be a necessary step, luckily you can skip it.

I lost all my setup printers and the machine name changed to Macintosh.local as opposed to arctinic, which it retained as a computer name, all a bit odd. I thought Macintosh was deprecated within Apple.

The invisible fsck before letting you install is frustrating, it looks as if the install will not proceed, as there is no indication for you to wait whilst the file system check completes. A simple please wait would be enough.

The menus are weird, loosing the corners and gaining curves on the bottoms of menus after 20 years seems strange. The translucency of the menu bar is an odd decision as many have commented. The dock on the side and hidden is bearable.

Mail is really quick now, as is Spotlight, I'll still update quicksilver, but it will be good to have a quick access to system wide search. Performance is something Apple really do well, that is making things seem fast, I have a story in my head that the Apple development approach is to not let new features slow done the existing system, so if you add something that slows the system down, you need to compensate, sadly I can't find the reference anymore.

It is the dozens of minor changes that make this a nice release like the Bluetooth menu allowing you to change things about the connected gadgets. The redone Sharing control panel which makes more sense. CoverFlow and QuickLook, how have we lived without these tools, they are fab, finding something is so much more easy.

Time Machine looks fabulous, particularly when combined with a remote offsite backup solution like Strongspace and a bootable recovery tool like SuperDuper! Then all the bases are covered theft/fire immediate recovery and careless deletion. Whether I manage to do all of these it a moot point.

I'm looking forward to having fun with the sharing facilities of iChat, but outside our company firewall, as only Adium seems to be able to get through it. Spaces seems excellent if slightly inconsistent, picking up focus seems to not be obvious, particularly when moving to the window with Firefox, but maybe Safari is worth looking at again for general web browsing leaving Firefox for hacking.

On the whole I'm happy with my eighty-five quids worth, the wireless keyboard is better value and more shiny though...

Apple ship Mac OS X 10.5 tomorrow, hot on the heels of fantastic results, as sharply written up by John Gruber. I don't think I'm going to make it to the launch event tomorrow, but will be getting Leopard pretty soon. The guided tour is pretty informative, standouts for me from the video are Time Machine, Cover Flow and Quick Look. The ability to look inside files without waiting for applications to launch will be super. Time Machine solves a hard problem in backups, giving you the ability to head back to a single file, without reverting the entire disk to that state. The integration with individual applications looks clever too, hopefully it will be simple to integrate this with non-Apple applications.

The sharing tools in iChat look really smart and Spaces seems like a clean implementation of the unix virtual desktop metaphor. There is also a ton of developer level updates in this release from improved Automator and Applescript to Ruby on Rails as a shipping tool.

For a bit of fun I have a nice picture of a Leopard who is just waiting for your captions too.

Tags:
apple, macosx, leopard, caption competition

Why did I just take an 18 month contract and a new N95 than wait six months with my Nokia 6630 and get an iPhone on O2?

The primary driver was availability, plus GPS, 3G, a decent camera and the rest (funny mocking ad comparing N95 and iPhone). I've waited through the N70, the N80 (briefly) and the N73 waiting for a phone which can act as a computer, camera and phone in one. I'm interested in how much of my persistence I can manage through my phone. I'm a twitter user and with the N95 I'll become a jaiku user. Then there is fire eagle and getting the flickr client working again on my phone.

The iPhone looks nice, but as willo and Duncan point out it is not without its flaws. Much of the UI strangeness comes from it feeling like an American product, not a European one. SMS is an important part of my life, as is decent 3G access. It seems unlikely that the iPhone will gain either 3G or proper GPS soon. The SMS issues, like only one recipient will be fixed, but the mapping aspect is important.
I lost my phone a while ago and I've not got round to moving the Lumisoft map application to my replacement 6630. I miss it a lot. I'd not realised how much a part of my life it had become for me in London. The N95 promised to offer this for the whole of the UK and potentially the rest of Europe. That is tempting.

Give me 18 months and an improved iPhone and I might be tempted, but for now the open environs of the N95 seem quite tempting, I'll be installing apache and Python soon. I really hope Omni allow S60 access to the rails app in OmniFocus though.

I tend to generate 12-20 tabs very easily when I'm researching a topic and then I can leave them open for a good while as I get around to reading them all. I can end up with 100 plus tabs open easily. In Safari this leads to heavy memory usage and on my 2GB PowerBook G4 this lead to 2 or more Gig of swap space and a basically unusable machine. Seconds of waiting between actions, at times. All cured by either quiting Safari and letting the VM recover or a restart. So, I decided to finally switch to Firefox.

I know it has taken me ages, but I'd got taken by Saft and saving my open tabs. Session Saver did this for Firefox 1.5 and it is now a slightly hidden feature on Firefox 2. A dropdown is not a good place to hide additional functionality. It is on the first tab in preferences, but looks like a drop down that controls the Home Page behaviour. So the other reason to move to Firefox, the lovely add-ons eg Operator and Tails which highlight microformats.

Firefox is not without its faults, it seems to be more CPU bound than Safari was, so my machine has a lower VM usage, 1 gig typically, but the CPU load sits about 2 most of the time. It makes my envious of Lucy's new MacBook.

helion:~ gavin$ sudo gem install mofo

WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss
or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your
typing when using sudo. Type "man sudo" for more information.

To proceed, enter your password, or type Ctrl-C to abort.

MacOS X 10.4.9 added the prompt ?

When will my potential AppleTV or desktop iMac be able to help out my PowerBook on compute intensive image processing. I own all these computers, so I can install what I like. There are distributed computing environments eg Qmaster for a range of high end rendering applications like Final Cut Pro and Shake etc. So when will this become a reality in the home?

I can imagine a version of Aperture 2.0 which will look for local compute resources and send batches over Wifi to the computer and wait for response. I realise there are bandwidth issues, but say thumbnail processing following import or any batch operation would benefit.

Too many of my mac using friends surprise me by not being that hot on backups, having nearly lost my mac to ill-fortune a while back, I take backups more seriously now. However I spent a long time looking for the friction-less way of doing it, trying .Mac Backup and mirroring to local hard disks etc. I've now found what I think is a minimalist, but effective solution. This is one that will get you your important stuff back, but maybe not everything, I'll explain.

I use Strongspace and the recipe for iCal, Transmit and Automator. I then set my Documents folder to mirror sync using an iCal appointment running a script every work day at 11. It is advisable to do the first backup manually, as the script will fail if the sync hits problems. My Documents folder was a few gig and took a good while for the first copy across, but now the sync takes 10-15 minutes.

Strongspace has pretty much always been there when I've needed to sync stuff to it. I know that this is entirely possible using rsync, but iCal is a really friendly way to do this, I can shift a backup if I know I'm going to be busy, or skip them, without editing a script. I no longer need to worry about that part of my backup routine, pictures are next for the strongspace approach. Applications I have disks or can download, music I mostly have on CD, so could re-rip or copy to externals. I'd recommend giving stongspace a try.

A common enough dilemma at the minute, can I wait til December to get an iPhone, or should I upgrade my 6630. I'm well out of contract with Orange, nearly a year out, but I'm very tempted by an iPhone. My 6630 is slow, and the once lovely camera now frustrates when trying to take lower light pictures of Oscar.
So do I get an N73 now, wait for Orange to approve the lovely looking N95, or change provider to get a contract with say O2? Any opinions of other UK mobile phone providers on monthly contracts appreciated. I use my phone for Twitter, Flickr and sending the odd email, plus normal phone usage.